1Omnii Pty Ltd Level 2, 405 Little Bourke Street Melbourne VIC 3000, Australia.
2Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, West Indies Phone: +1868 6622002 Ext 3185 Fax: +1 868 6624414 Email: chowdarybv@hotmail.com.
* Corresponding Author.
In a flexible manufacturing environment, the determination of operational sequences is very important for the balanced utilization of resources and the optimal throughput of the system. In this paper, a real time scheduling approach for assignment of operations to machines in terms of minimization of flow distances, operational time and balance of workload is proposed through a fourphase heuristic. In phase 1, primary assignment of operations to machines based on the minimization of flow distances is done. Phase 2 involves final assignment of operations by assigning highest time consuming operations to quick processing machines. Phase 3 involves balance of workload by shifting operations among the machines. Phase 4 involves minimization of inter machine flow distances among machines. In order to show the capability of the proposed real-time scheduling heuristic, a reasonable sample of nineteen parts and twelve machines in a FMS environment is considered and solved. Numerical results show that the real time scheduling heuristic is extremely adaptive and highly time efficient even for solving a system with large number of parts and machines. The method is highly time efficient even for solving an FMS system with large number of parts and machines within a reasonable time.
balanced workload model, FMS, job shop operations, processing time, scheduling
